Very funny.  It seems that the US Bishops were April Fooled by Twitter. H/T New Advent

From the USCCB Media Blog post titled Catholic Rules for Twitter:

On Friday, April 1st, the USCCB fell victim to an April Fools-esque joke…in the form of a tweet.

Earlier in the day, @VitaCatholic tweeted a comment that was misinterpreted as being critical of a Catholic organization. The backlash due to the comment led to another tweet from @VitaCatholic requesting some rules for Catholic tweeting, “Can someone give me the link to the Catholic Rules For Twitter? I never read it and apparently missed the rule that joking isn’t allowed.” Another Twitter user, @sullijo, responded with a tongue-in-cheek rule, “Never tweet quotes from the NAB without express permission of @USCCB,” and added the hashtag #CatholicRulesForTwitter.

And a minor Twitter meme was born.

After viewing a few tweets containing inaccurate information about USCCB copyright guidelines (and unaware that they were jokes), @USCCB decided to jump in the “conversation” and correct those we believed to be misinformed by tweeting, “@thomaspringle @VitaCatholic @sullijo Correction: You do not need permission to retweet our content. Retweet away. #CatholicRulesForTwitter.”

Then we took some time to read more tweets with the #CatholicRulesForTwitter hashtag, and soon caught on to the joke. It was time to give credit where credit was due:  Continue reading here.

While they were a bit slow to catch on to the joke, the Bishops are good sports. They LOL at Tweets such as:

@sullijo: Do not refer to tweeting bishops as “Your Twexellency.” #CatholicRulesForTwitter

@CatholicDan: Tweets posted on Saturday night count as being written on Sunday. #CatholicRulesForTwitter

Ahh. The brave and funny new world of social media.